Human aging is not what natural selection failed to prevent. It is what happens when selection simply has nothing left to act ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

The work demonstrates the power of ancient DNA to illuminate human biology and medicine in addition to history. A massive ...

A massive study of ancient and modern DNA from thousands of West Eurasian people has identified nearly 500 genetic variants ...

Over the past 10,000 years, evolution in West Eurasia has been selecting for light skin, red hair and resistance to HIV and ...

Ancient DNA reveals how farming accelerated human evolution, driving genetic changes over the past 10,000 years.

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

As early humans spread from lush African forests into grasslands, their need for ready sources of energy led them to develop a taste for grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy plant tissue ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

Our bodies are not perfectly designed, but are a living archive of evolution. Anatomy reveals a historical record of ...